WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:11.200 Well, let me start us off today then. 00:11.200 --> 00:17.520 I wanted to just make some sort of general comments about the territory we're dealing 00:17.520 --> 00:26.080 with and some of the key issues that are on my mind as I was listening to the discussions 00:26.080 --> 00:32.680 yesterday and doing other things preparing for this meeting. 00:32.680 --> 00:39.160 I think I've persuaded myself and I'm going to try and persuade you that we're moving 00:39.160 --> 00:45.360 into a kind of a second generation understanding of personal archives. 00:45.360 --> 00:52.200 And I think if you think back, those of you who were here yesterday, you can see the thread 00:52.200 --> 01:00.720 and the tensions around that running through a great deal of the discussion and the presentations. 01:00.720 --> 01:08.760 I think that, you know, probably by the mid-90s, a number of us had realized that there was 01:08.760 --> 01:18.960 a revolution going on in personal archiving as we conceived it then, where we were extrapolating 01:18.960 --> 01:27.320 very directly from the kind of ideas rooted in personal papers of individuals or perhaps 01:27.320 --> 01:37.400 organizations that had made up essential sorts of special collections in libraries and archives 01:37.400 --> 01:41.000 over a period of hundreds of years. 01:41.000 --> 01:47.040 At that point in the early to mid-90s, we were extrapolating that to say those documents 01:47.040 --> 01:56.560 are now digital, they're stored in a variety of kind of flaky storage devices that change 01:56.560 --> 02:04.520 from year to year, they aren't necessarily migrated by their owners, that questions about 02:04.520 --> 02:12.800 things like the availability of multiple drafts of documents would change substantially from 02:12.800 --> 02:21.920 the old physical world of revisions and handwritten annotation and things like that to the, you 02:21.920 --> 02:26.720 know, drafting and redrafting in electronic form. 02:26.720 --> 02:34.880 At the same time, we suspected that because of the move to electronic mail, more ephemeral 02:34.880 --> 02:40.080 correspondence would stay around and be more plentiful. 02:40.080 --> 02:49.480 But we were really extrapolating very strongly from the sort of idea of personal papers and 02:49.480 --> 02:52.920 things that were never public. 02:52.920 --> 03:01.520 What we're really seeing and spending a lot of our time on in the discussions yesterday, 03:01.520 --> 03:07.440 and what really seems to be a harder problem because it is largely without precedent, is 03:07.440 --> 03:16.640 that we're also finding there's this now shared space of not exactly personal materials but 03:16.640 --> 03:26.160 material that belongs to groups, material that isn't published but has been made public 03:26.160 --> 03:35.320 in a very limited sense, the kinds of things that show up on social media of various kind, 03:35.320 --> 03:43.640 and that we're fighting with the questions of how to relate that to truly, you know, 03:43.640 --> 03:51.440 personal archives in the earlier sense I described, and also how to think about the issues involved 03:51.440 --> 03:55.960 in preserving that kind of material. 03:55.960 --> 04:05.280 If you reflect a bit on Kathy Marshall's presentation, for example, I think you'll see how complicated 04:05.280 --> 04:12.480 and complex the senses of ownership and control and appropriate reuse of those kinds of shared 04:12.480 --> 04:15.320 resources are. 04:15.320 --> 04:20.200 This is very poorly understood territory. 04:20.200 --> 04:27.640 Even when we have truly personal collections of things like images that are then shared 04:27.640 --> 04:35.920 out through these social platforms, we find that the shared version has more value because 04:35.920 --> 04:43.680 of the context and commentary and linkages that are built up around it. 04:43.680 --> 04:52.520 We also, I think, face a problem when we look at the shared material where it doesn't exactly 04:52.520 --> 04:56.960 belong to single individuals anymore. 04:56.960 --> 05:04.560 There's a class of this material that becomes, for example, like family archives that may 05:04.560 --> 05:11.200 be kept by a member of the family for a while but are actually passed on from one person 05:11.200 --> 05:17.200 to the next that have some sort of collective decision-making process around it. 05:17.200 --> 05:24.120 This is a very different kind of material than the sort of pure personal archive that 05:24.120 --> 05:26.240 we've thought about. 05:26.240 --> 05:32.600 And I think we can see the confusion in many kinds of questions. 05:32.600 --> 05:43.240 For example, there's been a lot of emphasis on what happens to your stuff, to your sort 05:43.240 --> 05:51.320 of digital representation of yourself after you die, and about bothering not just wishes 05:51.320 --> 06:00.320 but interests of individuals and the things they kept and thought were important. 06:00.320 --> 06:08.120 Here the passage from one person to the next becomes much less clear in these shared spaces. 06:08.120 --> 06:15.880 It's not sort of it was yours and then you go away and some other person or group carries 06:15.880 --> 06:16.880 on with it. 06:16.880 --> 06:21.520 There really is a sort of a collective issue. 06:21.520 --> 06:25.760 That collective issue has a lot of implications. 06:25.760 --> 06:33.400 I talked a little bit about the decision-making and the relationship between the purely personal 06:33.400 --> 06:42.040 on one side and the sort of shared space on the other. 06:42.040 --> 06:45.760 We find that shared spaces are a vulnerable platform. 06:45.760 --> 06:51.360 We heard about GeoCities, for example, and the abrupt shutdown there. 06:51.360 --> 06:59.080 I think we will see more and more fairly abrupt shutdowns in coming years of things that are 06:59.080 --> 07:06.960 economically marginal or haven't really gained market traction. 07:06.960 --> 07:13.960 There is some very interesting research, actually, I believe, much of it going back again to 07:13.960 --> 07:20.760 Kathy Marshall and some of her collaborators, where they looked at where was personal material 07:20.760 --> 07:27.640 at most risk and stretching the result just a little bit. 07:27.640 --> 07:29.360 I haven't noticed whether she's here today. 07:29.360 --> 07:35.840 I hope she is so she can correct me later if I stretch it too far. 07:35.840 --> 07:44.640 She argued that one of the places where material was at most risk is when an individual made 07:44.640 --> 07:52.360 a transition in their job from one company to another because often their records, their 07:52.360 --> 07:57.000 email, their documents were very tied up with their work. 07:57.000 --> 08:03.320 There were often sort of abrupt discontinuities there, things that were lost in translation 08:03.320 --> 08:09.040 or you never quite got around to copying and then recopying back. 08:09.040 --> 08:18.280 I think that platform migrations of all kinds in these sorts of social settings, not just 08:18.280 --> 08:27.960 job-related ones, are periods of considerable peril for the continuity of this kind of material 08:27.960 --> 08:33.640 and that's a lesson that we need to think very carefully about. 08:33.640 --> 08:39.840 Implicit there also are some questions in my mind about the length of relationship. 08:39.840 --> 08:47.120 What's the average in a sort of length of the relationship that an individual has with 08:47.120 --> 08:49.720 one of these social platforms? 08:49.720 --> 08:55.200 That may be determined by the emergence of a more attractive social platform a few years 08:55.200 --> 09:01.760 hence and the sort of pilgrimages we've seen over the years where users leave one service 09:01.760 --> 09:11.120 in droves and find their way to a newer, more interesting one, a few stay behind. 09:11.120 --> 09:19.600 How does that compare to the duration of relationships that we'd like people to have with memory 09:19.600 --> 09:26.440 organizations, with archives and libraries that are going to hold this kind of social 09:26.440 --> 09:27.440 material? 09:27.440 --> 09:34.960 I think thinking through the stability and the duration of relationships and of platforms 09:34.960 --> 09:43.000 is going to be very critical to getting a handle on these kind of shared space situations. 09:43.000 --> 09:52.720 I think that there's also another class of developments that have become a real priority 09:52.720 --> 09:58.520 for archiving that clearly move outside the personal archiving space and these are the 09:58.520 --> 10:05.560 kind of large-scale and mostly public views of social media systems. 10:05.560 --> 10:13.280 You can hear of the Library of Congress' arrangements to archive Twitter or the sort of arrangements 10:13.280 --> 10:19.680 one might make to do something similar with a system like Facebook where there's a very 10:19.680 --> 10:26.160 significant amount of public material on there and clearly the way to deal with this is to 10:26.160 --> 10:34.680 move it wholesale into a memory organization on a periodic basis through some kind of formal 10:34.680 --> 10:36.400 arrangement. 10:36.400 --> 10:44.560 This sort of sits on the other side of these ambiguous shared spaces for archiving. 10:44.560 --> 10:52.320 I don't think we understand that relationship terrifically well either and I think it's 10:52.320 --> 11:01.280 an area where, again, some creative thinking might be expressed. 11:01.280 --> 11:09.120 For example, the notion that someone could set up an arrangement with a large social 11:09.120 --> 11:17.120 media system, move not just the public parts but also the closed parts into a trusted memory 11:17.120 --> 11:23.840 organization with an understanding that the closed parts would remain closed either for 11:23.840 --> 11:30.040 some embargo period of time or until they were explicitly open, but thereby getting 11:30.040 --> 11:35.720 a lot of leverage on this kind of closed material. 11:35.720 --> 11:42.800 This is very much sort of an extension of what I believe Brewster said, which I absolutely 11:42.800 --> 11:50.200 believe yesterday, which is we need to archive new buttons on a lot more things. 11:50.200 --> 11:56.720 This really is going to be the essence of capturing a great deal of this history. 11:56.720 --> 12:08.360 I want to just make one other set of comments, which I think are also very much on my mind 12:08.360 --> 12:13.760 and I think we need to think hard about. 12:13.760 --> 12:21.320 There's a notion of public lives, if you will. 12:21.320 --> 12:27.040 There's the sort of sense that there's some minimum record of people's lives that's public 12:27.040 --> 12:39.480 record, at least birth and death dates, perhaps the list of children, perhaps public offices 12:39.480 --> 12:47.280 that were held by the individual or things that were published, various moves into the 12:47.280 --> 12:54.160 public sphere that are appropriate to record, and we've built up many, many systems to record 12:54.160 --> 13:03.840 those things over the years, library catalogs, genealogy systems, dictionaries of national 13:03.840 --> 13:09.000 biographies, who's who systems. 13:09.000 --> 13:16.280 These are becoming much more open, much more connected, and much more extensive. 13:16.280 --> 13:22.640 Look at the number of biographical entries for people in Wikipedia, for example. 13:22.640 --> 13:29.800 Look at the scale of the genealogy work that goes on online. 13:29.800 --> 13:37.640 Recognize that in the higher ed world now, where publishing and tracking of publication 13:37.640 --> 13:44.640 is very important for a lot of reasons, there are conversations going on about assigning 13:44.640 --> 13:54.800 unique author IDs, which would allow people's records of authorship to be tracked much less 13:54.800 --> 14:02.000 ambiguously than they are today, where you still find journal articles, for example, 14:02.000 --> 14:10.640 by Smith, J., and it's really hard to figure out which one of them it is. 14:10.640 --> 14:18.160 There's a lot of move to make at least some activities of large sectors of the population 14:18.160 --> 14:24.000 more transparent, more public. 14:24.000 --> 14:32.120 I think we need to think very hard about how these public social spaces and even these 14:32.120 --> 14:39.480 sort of shared social spaces interconnect to this more general kind of infrastructure of 14:39.480 --> 14:40.480 society. 14:40.480 --> 14:43.080 I don't know what the heck else to call it. 14:43.080 --> 14:44.080 It's bound up in identity. 14:44.080 --> 14:45.080 It's bound up in genealogy. 14:45.080 --> 14:54.640 It's bound up in the processes of publication and information dissemination. 14:54.640 --> 15:01.640 But I believe that there is absolutely a strong linkage there, which is going to need some 15:01.640 --> 15:04.520 very considerable study. 15:04.520 --> 15:13.400 One of the sort of opener questions I'd ask is for sort of regular folks, what's the public 15:13.400 --> 15:16.400 part of a life? 15:16.400 --> 15:17.400 Is there something? 15:17.400 --> 15:20.400 Do we have a social consensus on that? 15:20.400 --> 15:23.720 Do we have a legal consensus on that? 15:23.720 --> 15:31.640 There are some bits where maybe we do, but that becomes a sort of a scaffolding. 15:31.640 --> 15:40.840 One can ask beyond that, what are actions that people can take that become permanently 15:40.840 --> 15:46.320 public in a certain sense and need to be integrated into these? 15:46.320 --> 15:55.440 How does this connect up to these public spaces, public social spaces, shared spaces, and indeed 15:55.440 --> 15:58.960 even personal spaces? 15:58.960 --> 16:06.160 I hope that those kind of general reflections give you maybe a little bit of a different 16:06.160 --> 16:13.040 framework for thinking about the problems and the challenges that are implicit here. 16:13.040 --> 16:19.780 I know that one of the things I've taken away from particularly the discussions yesterday 16:19.780 --> 16:28.920 is a very strong sense that if we simply extrapolate from the challenge of personal papers as 16:28.920 --> 16:38.360 they've been framed historically and try and shoehorn the development of these shared 16:38.360 --> 16:45.960 social spaces into a framework that's set by that historical view of personal papers, 16:45.960 --> 16:52.800 we're going to miss a tremendous amount of the sort of key issues here. 16:52.800 --> 16:53.800 Thanks. 16:53.800 --> 17:05.400 I think I ended a couple minutes ahead, so what I'm going to propose is let's forge 17:05.400 --> 17:16.360 right ahead and bank that time because we've got a tremendous number of speakers. 17:16.360 --> 17:22.000 While we're doing the kanga, I'm going to ask you, you see a lot of institutional behavior. 17:22.000 --> 17:26.160 You're in touch with kind of the whole world of higher ed, and I just wonder if there was 17:26.160 --> 17:31.800 one kind of thought or comment about what's going on in that community of higher education 17:31.800 --> 17:32.800 institutions. 17:32.800 --> 17:39.080 Well, I think this whole question about managing author identity is very significant. 17:39.080 --> 17:46.800 There are rich ironies here because the universities have plowed a ton of money and work into technical 17:46.800 --> 17:52.880 identity management systems and single sign-on and things like that over the years, but they've 17:52.880 --> 18:01.040 largely forgotten this whole question of wanting to have identity management for the authorial 18:01.040 --> 18:07.960 roles of their faculty and students, and now they seem to be picking that up and connecting 18:07.960 --> 18:14.120 it up with the work of publishers on one side, but also with great literature on the other 18:14.120 --> 18:20.200 because you're seeing investments in institutional repositories and things like this. 18:20.200 --> 18:25.840 This is forcing institutions to go back to doing local name authority control essentially 18:25.840 --> 18:34.120 in a way they haven't done for decades, really many decades because they've been so focused 18:34.120 --> 18:39.360 on the common sort of collective published literature. 18:39.360 --> 18:44.960 Now they are taking much more stewardship of the work of their faculty published or 18:44.960 --> 18:50.960 not, and they need to be able to describe that in a big way. 18:50.960 --> 18:51.960 Thank you very much. 18:51.960 --> 18:52.960 Thanks for making the time. 18:52.960 --> 19:10.200 Thank you.